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[Reelya]

Greetings fellow players, I started a new fortress a couple weeks ago and at the begging of it's third year, i have yet to receive a non dwarven caravan or be visited by a snatcher and the civ menu only displays a dwarven and a kobold civ, so i'm no too worried about sieges but as my name suggests, I'm not an especially good player so i'd rather be cautious. also my army is tragically under developed due to the scarcity of minerals in the map and the drafting of most dwarves into farming. Welcome to soviet Eldershatchet! Anyways,here's the problem: the lands are unfarmable so i had to dig around ponds to water the ground. To adequately feed the fortress, i had to use maximum sized farms placed all around the ponds and draft about a third of the adult population into farming, Only this left exposed areas in the hillside that i blocked with walls, but that still have exposed roofs. Can someone please help me with this? (along with how to give marxdwarves (see what i did there) quivers (cant see to find any options in the military menu or info on the wiki)).

first up:

drafting of most dwarves into farming

This is a big mistake. You should have 1-2 growers at the start. This helps them skill up faster, and higher skill = more produce per plot. Having more farmers actually hurts productivity since you're spreading out the farming XP and each plot therefore won't produce so much food in the long run. alcohol doesn't have quality levels, so you can throw the brewer skill on any dwarf you need to as it goes, e.g. double up your farmers as brewers, and/or have 1 cook, who brews whenever there's excess meals produced.

One trick for maxxing out food without lots of labor is to used booze cooking. Produce a LOT of plump helmets, brew them into lots of wine, and then cook the booze along with solid food into meals. One plant stack (which could be e.g. 5 plants), brews to 5x the amount of alcohol (e.g. 25), and can then be cooked, and each unit of food cooked counts as one meal. Therefore, if you have 4 stacks of 5x plump helmets, and brew 3 stacks, then cook 1 plump helmet + 3 plump helmet wines, you get 5+25*3 = 80 dwarf meals from harvesting a 4 tile farm plot. Dwarfs need 2 units of food per season, so those 4 farm tiles, if planned effectively, can feed 40 dwarves. You can force booze cooking by linking a kitchen to 2 stockpiles, one a 1x1 stockpile that takes a solid food (but no barrels allowed), and also to the booze stockpile, make sure to turn on "only take from links". the cook will always take the 1 solid ingredient, and for the rest he/she will be forced to take from the booze pile.

Starting with 1 proficient farmer is a good idea, because it kickstarts the harvest stack size and you don't need tons of farmers early on (they won't be useful later on either because you will just end up with tons of mediocre farmers and too much production).

 always use smooth block walls since they're harder to climb than boulders. You can also dig a trench in front of a wall, that's a lot easier than building a 2x height wall, since you don't need scaffolding. So a quick and dirty defense is to channels trenches, then remove the ramps, whilst your other dwarves produce block walls behind the trenches. So a quick 2 wide moat might be the best fast defense to build if you have flowing water.